Is evolution to blame?

Thanks to Janine Suter

4D ultrasound image of human baby in the womb, taken at 20 weeks.

Published: 5 February 2012(GMT+10)

Todd S, Australia, wrote in with a comment about
Namibian genocide: precursor to the Holocaust, a review of the book The Kaiser’s
Holocaust. He argues that while evolution was misused by racists, their
racist beliefs cannot be linked back to evolution.
Dr Carl Wieland responds (his comments are interspersed with those of Todd S, who writes):

I have just finished reading this exceptionally well written book, and appreciate
the time and effort made for your review of it.

Carl W: Thank you.

However, in my opinion, it is somewhat concrete and facile, to condemn the ‘belief
system’ of Evolution on the basis of the misuse of this ‘belief system’
by a group of self serving miscreants, as this book illustrates horrifically.

By way of a quick response, though, in the interim, I would write as follows:

First, if we are mere effervescences of nature (reorganised pond scum, as it has
been less eloquently put), by what criterion or standard other than a totally subjective
and arbitrary one could you even refer to it as a ‘mis’ (i.e. ‘wrong’)
use? Why would Nazi morality, for instance, be ‘wrong’?

The same logic would condemn all religious belief on the basis of any misuse of
religion,
eg any of the multitude of religious wars, from the crusades onwards, or any misdeeds
by those with religious affiliation,

If we are mere effervescences of nature (reorganised pond scum, as it has been less
eloquently put), by what criterion or standard other than a totally subjective and
arbitrary one could you even refer to it as a ‘mis’ (i.e. ‘wrong’)
use?

Not quite. There is a missing ingredient in the logic here. If a Nazi or any other
committed evolutionist comes to believe that it is right and natural for the strong
to wipe out the weak, and acts upon that belief, he may be making an unnecessary
connection, but not an illogical or irrational or even inconsistent one, i.e. it
is consistent with his world and life view. (See
here for the documentation by a Professor of modern European history of
the direct and logical Darwin-Nazi link, including an actual clip from a Nazi film
that was viewed prewar by my own mother who grew up in Germany under Hitler.). Whereas
for a Christian to perform atrocities would be inconsistent with the teachings
of the founder of the faith (you hinted at the answer yourself when you said it
was a misuse; the antidote to a misuse is a return to the correct use). The same
could not be said of an Islamic jihadist, who can point to direct exhortations by
the founder of his faith to justify violence against unbelievers (see also
Unfair to Islam? that deals with your ‘moral equivalence’ approach).

This crucial matter of consistency with the premises explains readily why the really
massive democides of history, with over 100m slaughtered by their own governments,
were all in the 20th Century and involved

Furthermore, the huge numbers involved were orders of magnitude greater than those
killed in all the religious conflicts in history. Some love to cite the Spanish
Inquisition but even that has taken on legendary proportions. The reality is far
less spectacular than the oft-believed fantastic proportions. To quote from our
review of Vox Day’s
The Irrational Atheist:

The Spanish Inquisition is another ‘crime of religion’ that atheists
showcase. But the sole purpose of the Spanish Inquisition was to root out people
who professed to be Christians but were secretly practising other faiths; it had
no control over professing Jews, Muslims or atheists. Torture was rarely used, and
only when there was strong evidence that the accused was lying. Even then there
were strict controls in place. And in nearly 350 years, only 3,230 people were sentenced
to death, hardly the bloodbath of millions that it is sometimes made out to be.

eg abuses by Catholic ‘carers’ of those minors in their ‘care’.
This would really be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Indeed those abuses, totally inconsistent with the morality a Christian professes
to hold dear, should be condemned. And, as a Protestant, I would add that the same
is true for such sinful and shameful things occurring within Protestant churches,
schools, families—not just Catholic clergy. I have devoted a section of my
recent book, One Human Family,
to ‘Christian pedophiles, atrocities and more’.

However, often such priests are
best described as homosexual pederasts, since they usually target boys,
but it’s too politically incorrect to say so. Also, the incidence of sexual
abuse of children is about 100 times higher in the government schools where evolution
is the established religion, than in the church, but the mainstream media ignore
that.1

I also doubt
that a single pregnant mother has ever elected to abort her fetus as a knowing act
of genocide, based on any Darwinian/ Evolutionary theory.

As we argued in the feedback
Are vaccines biblical, safe, or effective?, the juxtaposition of the Latin
word ‘fetus’ (which really just means ‘little child’) and
the English word ‘mother’ is also linguistic dishonesty. In other words,
you use ‘medicalese’ for the unborn baby (‘fetus’), but
the everyday term ‘pregnant mother’ for what in ‘medicalese’
would be the ’gravida’. It would be more honest to either use the Latin
terminology for both, or the English terminology for both. As it is, the Latin ‘dehumanizes’
the baby in the womb.

She has simply decided that, for her, having that baby would be too difficult. I
struggle to see a cogent link that you seem to imply between abortion and Evolutionary
theory.
Or have I misunderstood the implications of your last paragraph?

When a society becomes increasingly shifted in its worldview from a Christian foundation
to an evolutionary/humanist one, it drives all sorts of changes in the society as
a whole that influence the way individuals think and behave, without the connection
necessarily being made by the individual.

It would seem so. Here again, a cursory search on our site might have been helpful.
Here goes the reasoning:

Genesis teaches that human life is sacred because human beings are created in the
image of God, so the
deliberate taking of innocent human life is murder, forbidden by one of the Ten
Commandments (as well as in the Noahic Laws of Genesis 9, and in the Law of Christ).

There are biblical and logical reasons to regard human life commencing
at conception. Even many rabid abortionists today concede that the unborn
does not suddenly become human when it starts to get its oxygen from air, rather
than its previous source. Philosopher and ethicist and animal rights activist, Australian-born
Princeton Professor Peter Singer, has conceded as much. He also states that the
only reason to forbid infanticide as an absolute would be if we were made in the
image of God, as was once believed. Since that is not so, he states, and since we
allow in many countries abortion (i.e. killing the baby) right until the time its
head appears (and for the sorts of reasons—including inconvenience or personal
hardship, or just plain preference—that you mention in your email) it would
be rational for a society to seriously consider giving parents of the newborn an
arbitrary period following birth (say 3 months) to decide whether that baby should
go on living. See
this article. Singer also points out that similar things were customary
in a number of pagan societies, e.g. ancient Rome. Singer’s writings show
that his entire ethic is informed and driven by his understanding of evolution,
so a rabbit has more rights than an infant in the womb at a certain stage of its
development.

When a society becomes increasingly shifted in its worldview from a Christian foundation
to an evolutionary/humanist one, it drives all sorts of changes in the society as
a whole that influence the way individuals think and behave, without the connection
necessarily being made by the individual. For example, an individual in a once-Christian
country may commit deed XYZ without the qualms they would likely have had if living
at an earlier time in that society, simply because that act is no longer the subject
of what we can call a ‘group prohibition’ in that culture when it had
a higher cultural regard for the biblical norms of behaviour. The reason for this
change is very much related to the huge influence of evolution on that culture,
thus undermining the authority of the Bible, which is clearly wrong if evolution
is fact. However, that does not mean by a long shot that the individual thinks explicitly
something like, ‘Oh, I’m a product of chance evolution, therefore I
can now do XYZ.’

Thus, in Australian society in the 50s in which I grew up, even my non-Christian
parents had their thinking informed and their actions constrained by the (Christian)
societal norms of the time. This is no longer the case today. Part of that social
consensus was that the Bible had some sort of authority, even for non-Christians;
and that there was absolute morality, that it would be terrible to see open homosexual
displays, etc., (which are now annually celebrated on the streets of Sydney) and
that there was some sort of Creator who made us, thus owns us, etc. And abortion
was also subject to a huge taboo precisely because it was taking innocent human
life, prohibited in biblical morality. For the majority of girls back then contemplating
the difficulty of an unwanted pregnancy, abortion was either quickly or eventually
dismissed because of this social consensus, the social stigma. Now what has changed
all that is that starting in about 1960, the teaching of evolution in Australia
became dramatically accelerated (see the reference to Sputnik in
this article on our site for why it happened at that point in time). The
Bible’s history in Genesis was openly questioned, then taught against, then
progressively relegated to a quaint belief, similar to leprechauns. Thus, the biblical
brakes were off, so to speak, and now someone contemplating abortion has no such
restraints; the very questions they ask of themselves and others are going to be
different, while not giving a second thought to the origins issue in most instances.

Incidentally, speaking as a former medical practitioner I can vouch for the fact
that some abortion clinics in earlier decades (I don’t know the situation
today) openly promoted Haeckel’s now-discredited
‘embryonic recapitulation’ theory to their prospective clients.
This was to help them overcome their qualms about killing a human—at that
stage of pregnancy, it was more like killing a worm or a fish, say. One only has
to look at the massive takeoff of abortion statistics in the whole Western world
around that time to see dramatic reinforcement of that logically-deduced link. The
link to genocide in Marc Ambler’s article is not, as you question, whether
anyone today condemning an individual baby to death is thinking of genocide. Rather,
that the scale of the abortion industry in the world today is more than comparable
to the worst genocidal holocaust in history. To me that was obvious from the text.

Further, still going back to my GP days, I can also vouch that the handful of girls
that came to me seeking referral to an abortionist had already swallowed the ‘killing
a fish’ type of idea. All I did, while being sensitive of their predicament,
was to gently show them some actual colour images of what their baby by that stage
would have been like. In every case that I can recall, they changed their mind.

Some fellow creationists (probably even I myself at one time) have claimed that
the humanity of the unborn ‘is not the issue’, rather it is solely the
authority of the Bible. But this overlooks the fact that we can’t appeal to
the Bible’s prohibition of murder unless the subject of the prohibition is
human. All the same, this appeal to the humanity of the baby may have worked only
because these girls had at least a vestige of Christian morality: that murder is
wrong. Showing them that the baby was human was enough.

Similarly, many young people today, when confronted with the facts, and sound ethical
reasoning, quickly change their minds about whether abortion is acceptable. See
some dramatic examples of this in the new online video 180, produced by Ray Comfort.

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References

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